Extracting Sequences from the Web

Classical Information Extraction (IE) systems fill slots in domain-specific frames. This paper reports on SEQ, a novel open IE system that leverages a domain-independent frame to extract ordered sequences such as presidents of the United States or the most common causes of death in the U.S. SEQ leverages regularities about sequences to extract a coherent set of sequences from Web text. SEQ nearly doubles the area under the precision-recall curve compared to an extractor that does not exploit these regularities.